


Guiding Light

by indoissetep



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Finn Skywalker, Force-Sensitive Finn, Gen, abusive environment, and fn-2187/slip, contains traces of finnrey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 07:22:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6557152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indoissetep/pseuds/indoissetep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of moments taken from the life of FN-2187/Finn that hint at his parentage and at the real depth and nature of his abilities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guiding Light

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by many a post on tumblr about Force-sensitive Finn and Finn Skywalker theories.

FN-2187 is six years old when he first learns how to shoot a blaster. The weight of it is almost too much and his arms tremble, but the first time he steps into the shooting range he hits almost every target dead center.

The other children gape at him, eyes full of awe, and FN-2187 swells with pride.

His commanding officer pulls him aside. There is no sign of awe or pride in his eyes, only anger. He wants to know how FN-2187 did it.

The boy doesn’t know what to tell him.

He is sent to reconditioning. Long, grueling sessions over the course of the next few days. After that, his aim is no better than that of the other novices.

His commanding officer looms over him and smirks.

_Now you’ll have to work just as hard as everybody else._

FN-2187 vows to work _harder_.

 

* * *

 

FN-2187 is eight years old and he dreams of a man with sun-golden hair and impossibly kind eyes.

The man sits before him on the floor, in a room filled with sunlight and warm salty air. He moves his hand unhurriedly through the air, and FN-2187’s – no, that wasn’t his name then, but he can’t remember any other – toys move with them. Unsupported, carried by a force that is invisible but palpable. A warm tingling against his skin.

In the dream, FN-2187 laughs, delighted and carefree as he cannot ever remember feeling. The man laughs, too, and his laughter is that of a young boy, but the skin around his eyes crinkles up with lines that have been made deeper by time and grief.

He wakes to the snores of his fellow cadets, in a room that is dark and filled with cool, recycled air. But the space close to his knees feels charged, molecules aggitated with the residual heat of a body that was just there.

He remembers other times when he has felt this presence, moments when was compelled to look over his shoulders, searching for someone who always turned out not to be there.

He shares all of this with the other boys and girls in his unit, and they listen with bathed breaths. None of their dreams have ever been like this, none of them have ever spilled out into the waking world like this. They promisse to keep his secret, but someone overhears or someone talks, and later that day FN-2187 is ordered to report to the psych-ward for reconditioning.

The sessions leave him feeling hollow, cold and like his ears are full of water.

He doesn’t feel the warm presence watching over him anymore after that. And, in time, he forgets all about the dream.

 

* * *

 

 

FN-2187 is ten years old and is supposed to be loading the dishwashers with FN-2003. Except they both gave up any pretense of work long ago and are currently engaged in a duel to the death.

Their weapons of choice are a couple of long-handled ladles, but anyone with an ounce of imagination could see that they are really lightsabers.  They jump, duck and weave around each other, weapons clinking with every contact. In their minds, they are powerful Jedis settling an old grudge. In the real world, they are boys who finally have a chance to act like boys.

Their laughter bounces loudly off the walls. Too loudly. And suddenly they are no longer alone. Now it is the harsh voice of their commanding officer that bounces loudly off the walls, calling them to attention. Their ladles clatter to the floor.

They are ordered to run laps around the cavernous training room. The captain doesn’t say how many laps. Just keep going until he decides they’ve learned their lesson.

They run until their legs can’t hold them up any longer. Until they are on their hands and knees, alternating between retching and gulping down air that never seems to reach their lungs.

_At ease, cadets._

The captains voice is viscous and gloating.

But when the boys’s eyes meet they’re still bright with laughter.

 

* * *

 

 

FN-2187 is twelve years old when he arrives on Starkiller. It is the first time he has stepped foot on a planet in years, and the gravity seems to do something funny to his inner ear. It presses too heavily upon his shoulders, throws him off balance with every step and makes him dizzy. A durasteel snake coils itself around his ribs, trapping his lungs and making his heart flutter anxiously.

He wonders if he will ever feel at ease again.

The other boys in his team don’t seem to feel any of this. All they complain about is the cold, the cold, all the time. And it is true that the whole planet seems frozen solid. That every breath feels like inhaling chilled saline, and every exhale comes out as a white puff that clouds their vision.

Over the course of the following weeks, Nines’s cheeks turn a bright, raw pink from the freezing wind. Zeroes hugs himself, hunches his shoulders and looks even more sullen than usual. And Slip constantly vibrates with uncontrolable shivers.

But FN-2187 seems to be well insulated against the harshness of the weather. The other boys make comments about how he seems to radiate warmth, while they barely have enough to keep themselves unfrozen.

Whenever they have some free, unsupervised time – a rarity – Slip will find an excuse to snuggle up to FN-2187, to steal some of his body heat. Every first contact with Slip’s freezing skin makes FN-2187 jump, but he never complains.

In especially cold nights, when the sleet-heavy winds howl outside and threaten to force their way inside, FN-2187 says nothing as Slip climbs into his bunk. He allows the other boy to burrow under the blankets – as silently as possible – then pulls him close, winds his arms around him and fits their bodies together until the other boy is sighing happily against his neck. He then goes back to sleep with the smell of Slip’s hair in his nose.

 

* * *

 

 

FN-2187 is fifteen years old and he’s rewatching the same holo-documentary about the Galactic Civil War for the seventh time.

It might be the eighth time. He’s not sure.

Granted, the First Order’s library is severely lacking in material about said war. FN-2187 figures it must be very hard to frame the Empire in a positive light when talking about a conflict that it ultimately lost, so holos of that time do not make for very good propaganda.

These are traitorous thoughts, he knows, and he should not be entertaining them. Just as he should not be paying quite so much attention to the _wrong_ side in these battles.

The wrong side being, of course, the Rebels.

He tells himself his interest in them is purely academic, that he is analysing their strategies for any exploitable weaknesses. Know your enemy and all that.

But the lie is too transparent.

It is not their movements, their formations, their flight patterns, their choices of weaponry he examines. It is their faces. Unhelmeted faces of a dozen different colors and shapes and species, nothing like the white uniformity of the imperial stormtroopers.

He finds himself drawn to these faces, to brief glimpses of sun-golden hair under dark Jedi robes and flashes of night-dark skin amidst the chaos of battle.

FN-2187 cannot make sense of his misplaced interest, cannot explain it by any logic, or even find the right words to describe the feeling it stirs in his chest.

_Familiarity._

That’s the closest he can come to its real name.

 

* * *

 

 

FN-2187 is nineteen and he will never admit to anyone that he’s afraid of the shadow that haunts Starkiller base. The dark knight with a mask for a face, whom even the boldest cadets will only name in whispers.

In his patrols, FN-2187 prays to a multitude of gods from every corner of the Galaxy that he will not cross paths with the man. And that he will never cross him.

But the gods must not be listening, or he must be praying wrong, because FN-2187 and Zeroes turn a corner and there _he_ is.

Kylo Ren turns at the sound of their footsteps and looks straight at FN-2187 – even with the mask, the stormtrooper cadet is sure of it. Ren holds him in place with the weight of his stare, a stab of pain behind FN-2187’s eyes.

He clenches every muscle in his body as he feels something slither against his skin, trying to find a way to crawl inside his skull, though he knows that muscles will be no help against this.

Zeroes’s gaze is lost, darting restlessly between the other two.

FN-2187 thinks:

_He knows me. And he hates me._

And then:

_That’s crazy._

Ren turns with a swish of his long black coat and stomps off. FN-2187 is finally released to breath again, his ribs almost creak to accommodate his expanding lungs.

He stares at the spot Ren has just vacated, like he can almost make out the man’s heat signature, though his goggles are not equiped with infra-red.

Zeroes’s voice almost makes him jump out of his armor.

_What the hell was that all about?_

* * *

 

 

FN-2187 is twenty-three and he drops to his knees beside his fallen friend on the gritty sands of Jakku. The air is heavy with the acrid smell of smoke, and it makes his eyes water and his head swim even with his helmet’s filtering. Or maybe it’s something else.

FN-2003, Slip, also twenty-three, raises a bloody hand up to his helmet and drags red streaks down its white surface. The world tilts, screams and bursts.

The sunlight almost blinds him.

A woman with night-dark skin and long braids cascading down her shoulders stands under a soft pink sky. Her hand rests on the swell of her belly and a slow smile spreads across her face.

FN-2187 calls out to her, but she does not hear. He tries to reach for her, but the world shifts again.

The sky is the angry purple of a bruise.

The same woman bends over him, a gentle hand touching his cheek.

_It’s okay. Everything will be okay, sweetie. Just stay here._

Her voice is soothing, but her eyes are stained with fear and uncertainty. She stands, steps back and hefts a blaster before turning away.

He tries to follow, but she’s gone, blown away in a gust of sand.

A gust of snow.

The snow under his knees melts and soaks through the fabric of his pants.

A girl, younger than him, lies before him, eyelashes touching freckled cheeks. Her skin is warm beneath his palm and his heart feels like lead in his chest.

A roar draws his attention. He turns to see a man with a face that’s used to lurking behind a mask and eyes that are lost and mad with rage. Eyes that reflect the furious red of a lightsaber.

His hands come up of their own accord, and his own eyes reflect a pure luminous blue. The light swells until it becomes blinding, and FN-2187 screws his eyes shut.

A heavy hand lands on his shoulder, and a voice through his helmet’s speakers orders him to get back in formation. The glare of light comes from the fire that consumes the village around him. The air is heavy with sand and smoke.

He moves dazedly into formation and raises his blaster like a puppet.

Captain Phasma orders them to open fire.

A part of FN-2187 screams:

_Do it. Pull the trigger. Obey._

But a much louder and greater part responds:

_No. Never._

* * *

 

 

FN-2187 takes the gunner position in a stolen TIE-fighter, sitting back to back with a Resistance pilot, a prisoner, an enemy of the First Order.

He has honed his aim to perfect accuracy, and knows how to operate every model of blaster used by stormtroopers, but he has never manned a TIE-fighter’s guns before, and this feels like the worst possible time for a lesson. There are too many controls, too many toggles and switches and displays. Targets zoom before him too quickly as they hurtle through space in what is simultaneously the best and the most terrifying feat of piloting FN-2187 has ever seen.

It’s overwhelming, and FN-2187 forces himself to close his eyes for a split second, to draw a breath and center himself. When he opens them again, everything seems to slow down and come into sharp focus. And he hits one target after another, dead center. He whoops and cheers, and the man behind him does the same.

The man offers FN-2187 his name. Poe Dameron.

Then he offers the stormtrooper a new name. Finn.

* * *

 

 

Finn is back on Jakku – may all the gods who never answered his prayers damn this planet – and he is knocked off his feet by a fierce, beautiful girl with a face out of a vision.

He has a million questions he wants to ask her, but she’s the one interrogating him for now.

She asks him if he is with the Resistance, and Finn is reminded of holos of the Galactic Civil War, of being fifteen and drawn to the wrong side. Of looking for flashes of light hair and dark skin, not knowing why, and of being fascinated by a red symbol like a bird taking flight.

The insignia of the enemy. Then and now. The banner that stood for those who dared to rebel against the Empire, and that now stands for those who dare to defy the First Order.

The lie rises easily to his lips.

_I’m with the Resistance._

 

* * *

 

 

Finn is on Takodana, both feet firmly planted on the loading ramp of the freighter that will fly him to the relative safety of the Outer Rim, when he hears the sound. A terrible chorus of a billion voices, arising out of nowhere and falling silent just as abruptly. It resonates

He looks up reflexively, searching for the source of the sound and finding nothing but the sun burning high and bright in the sky. That and the long red gash that stretches slowly across the blue before blooming like a supernova.  And though his eyes ache with the sick radioactive glare, his chest aches with a cold barren feeling like a nuclear winter. 

Later, amidst the chaos of battle, Maz Kanata presses a lightsaber into his hands and tells him to use it.

The blade comes alive with the push of a button, a fine hum resonating in his bones, and Finn almost laughs as he thinks that it feels nothing at all like wielding a soup ladle.

He fights his way through stormtroopers he tries his best not to recognize, and faces off against one that he would know anywhere. He is spared from having to finish off this opponent, or rather, from being finished off by him, by a perfectly timed shot from Han Solo.

He rejoins Solo and Chewie. They gain the upper hand, they lose it, they are rescued by the Resistance’s X-wings. And when the battle seems all but won and the First Order begins its retreat, Finn sees her.

Rey. Unconcious. Carried away in the arms of the shadow of Starkiller base.

Finn races toward the transport, everything else around him gone dark and distant with the worst kind of tunnel vision. His feet aren’t fast enough, so he follows the ascending ship with his eyes and his voice, ripped out of his throat until it’s raw.

Fragments of a waking dream float through his mind. Snow and red and warm, freckled skin beneath his hand.

He wants to tear at his own hair. To rage at himself for his own stupidity. He knew this would happen. He knew running away was never an option.

So he does the only thing he can, and runs right back into the jaws of the beast he tried to escape.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are always appreciated.


End file.
